The debate IQ goes down

Author of The Missing Times: News Media and Complicity in the UFO Cover-up, Hansen took an academician’s long view of the Fourth Estate’s mangled relationship with The Great Taboo. His book was a revelation when it was published in 2000, at least for me. When he passed away suddenly last month — lucky enough, in the words of Kenny Rogers, to “break even” by dying in his sleep — it made me wish we’d had at least a few more chats.

“Journalists who think they’re too intelligent to be fooled are, in fact, the most susceptible to being fooled” — Terry Hansen/CREDIT: visionconsciousness.com

With degrees in biology and science journalism, Hansen filed his first take on UFOs with Minnesota Public Radio in 1980 and stayed focused ever since. The Missing Times was his calling card, and it was an eye-opener, its premise rooted primarily in World War II. That’s when, facing an existential threat, Uncle Sam recruited talent like Byron Price, executive editor of the Associated Press, to head the War Department’s Office of Censorship. Before you could say boo, reports of U-boat havoc to U.S. shipping lanes off the Eastern Seaboard were being suppressed to keep Americans from getting too demoralized, if not outright panicky. And that was for starters.

The Missing Times argued that Big Media’s collusion with the feds on distorting UFO coverage was a top-down process emanating from those cozy wartime relationships. Hansen’s case was largely inferential, but his research on moguls from the Washington Post’s Katherine Graham and The New York Times’ Arthur Sulzberger and on into the margins with The National Enquirer’s Generoso Pope evoked some chilling perspectives. Hansen gave smaller news outlets high marks for local UFO coverage in the early postwar days. But he accused the big boys of complying with the 1953 CIA Robertson Panel’s recommendations to end “the cultivation of a morbid national psychology” allegedly perpetrated by UFOs, by “strip(ing them) of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.” He touted depressing correspondences suggesting that even The Most Trusted Man In America — Walter Cronkite — may have fallen under the propaganda spell in his 1966 UFO debunking report for CBS.

De Void had several lively chats with Hansen over the years. I contended the erosion of centralized media in the digital culture pretty much laid to waste whatever was left of the alleged WWII cocoon. This was shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq; Hansen countered that the alacrity with which corporate media parroted the myriad government lies for attacking Baghdad was proof that the newsies — at least, at top management levels — remained in dependency mode, on multiple issues. He mentioned, for instance, how uncritically The New York Times swallowed and regurgitated the 2007 CIA report stating that more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and early ‘60s were due to mistaken identity of spyplanes. Yet, an independent cross-check of the actual Project Blue Book records indicates few — if any — spyplane cases had ever fallen into the UFO category.

“When it comes to the media disseminating government propaganda,” Hansen said, “that relationship exists and is still in place. I don’t think it’s changed; if anything, it might’ve gotten worse.”

Per UFOs, that’s difficult for De Void to square. More than 25 years of reporting on the fringe — for Gannett, the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, now Halifax Media — and never a discouraging word, other than a few rolled eyes from managers. Maybe that’s an indicator of what a lightweight De Void is; De Void, after all, has meager resources. What we agreed on is that, when it comes to The Great Taboo, there don’t have to be any top-down edicts anymore. Reporters police themselves nowadays.

“It’s a conditioned response,” Hansen said. “Someday I’d love to see a poll on media attitudes and how much they really know about this subject.”

8 comments on “The debate IQ goes down”

I haven’t read the late Mr Hansen’s book, but it appears to address a problem that is arguably as important as the subject of UFOs, i.e. the control and flow of information in our society.
Annie Jacobsen’s Area 51, the premise of Mirage Men, Dr John Alexander’s inside view of the military, Nick Redfern’s contacts (to name a few) all provide information or insights into this issue. At first glance they seem to be contradictory, but they raise important questions:
Was there ever an officially secret and unacknowledged investigation into UFOs?
Is there any form of officially secret investigation in place today?
Was there ever an unofficial, secret investigation i.e. one where individuals, or a group, used their position and influence to investigate unofficially (or control) the subject of UFOs?
Are (alleged) instances of good information being offered, then withdrawn, officially sanctioned?
Are instances of disinformation the result of the disruptive acts of individuals or groups, and under what authority, if any, are these persons operating?
Are certain ‘facts’ that some witnesses/whistle-blowers relate, the actual truth, or secondhand ‘information’, and are their sources privy to the actual truth?
Could an unofficial group, comprised of individuals in high office, remain intact over an extended period, i.e. decades?
To what extent do the biases/cognitive dissonance of individuals affect the investigation of UFOs: within the public arena, within academia, within government (officially and unofficially, within the military (officially and unofficially)?
What comparisons can be made between the secret study (and implementation) of remote viewing i.e. Stargate, and the field of UFO investigation?

Jess — I’m so sorry for your loss, and I won’t pretend to know what you’re going through. I appreciate your analogy and I suspect it will hold. Terry obviously knew he was onto something so big it couldn’t help but put him at a distance from many people. But he stuck with it when it would’ve been much easier and simpler to walk away, and that’s what made him courageous. Your loss is our loss, too. “They” say acceptance comes with time, but only you will know if that’s true. We’re not here for very long; my path intersected only briefly with his. Terry’s tenacity and focus linger, and remain an aspiration. Thank you.

“the cultivation of a morbid national psychology” allegedly perpetrated by UFOs, by “strip(ing them) of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.”

Translation: We don’t want the general public to know that we have no control over this phenomenon.

Because we always want the general public to think that the government is in complete control at all times.

A local suburban newspaper in Chicago did a fairly good job on reporting what has become to be known as the Tinley Park lights. One of the reports including info that a reporter, after getting phone calls that there were lights in the sky, walked out into the parking lot and looked up in the sky and saw the lights as well. She dutifully reported seeing the three lights in the sky. Not bad for local media!

Thank you so much for profiling my late husband’s work in such a praiseworthy way. He was an amazing man, iconoclastic scholar and a science journalist, par excellence. Richard Thieme described him as a ‘Jedi journalist,’ and anyone who is familiar with his work, would likely agree.

As Terry died suddenly, after a day spent kayaking, I am grappling with the reality of the situation. I ‘know’ he is gone but my sensory and emotional apparatus are still responding in a reflexive manner, expecting him to walk through the door.

I suppose this is referred to as ‘cognitive dissonance.’ One can draw comparisons to shocks to the system, in the interpersonal realm, to the shock to the cultural body and mind that ufos represent. Many people think ufos are real, but lend the topic no weight. The ufo topic hovers around the periphery of their own minds, having no impact and raising no further serious questions. They do not experience it as an immutable fact, an entrenched feeling of ‘the other’.

Serious (and public) scientific study was interfered with, through media and govt complicity, in the past, in a series of covert debunking and disreputable framing programs. Terry described this process well. But now the program appears to run itself.

Cognitive dissonance will eventually dissolve and the feeling that Terry is really gone, stepping from this bad dream, into a better one, will entrench and become a firm reality for me. But ufos are still stuck in a twilight zone where they are both real and unreal, both here but not here, within the cultural and individual mind.

Thanks again for the coverage of my dear husband’s death and a special thank you to Robert Hastings for pointing it out to me.

After decades of “training and debunking,” (Robertson Panel recommendation) newsrooms of most major media are imbued with the unspoken dictum that the UFO subject is fringe and not worthy of serious coverage. And if local media do cover a particular UFO event, the reporters know that it must be sprinkled with the cliches many of us now find quite hackneyed and tiresome: “true believers,” “little green men,” or the humming of a few bars from The Twilight Zone theme music. The current generation of reporters and editors saw their predecessors, and their predecessors, do the same thing. It has quietly become institutionalized. Notice, also, that most UFO stories, especially on tv news, appear in the space where we usually see bits about water skiing squirrels, and such. For most reporters and editors, careerism trumps open-minded enquiry. Hansen will be missed.

I love that 1966 CBS Special because it’s so bad by today’s standards (and that’s saying something), including the adverts in between, and Menzel’s debunking efforts. Quoting from memory – at one point a NORAD guy states that it he didn’t think that objects could be made undetectable by radar, although it might be possible. Yet Plessey had invented radar absorbent material in the 40’s or 50’s.
Not CBS’ finest hour.